Wednesday, June 26, 2013

I wish I owned a catering business ...

by digby

It looks like good news from the Supreme Court for our gay brothers and sisters today. Congratulations! I'll leave it to the legal beagles to sort out the particulars and I'll come back to that later. From what I'm gathering, it may be a bit more complicated than it appears at first blush.

Here's a Plain English take on Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenge to the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage: After the two same-sex couples filed their challenge to Proposition 8 in federal court in California, the California government officials who would normally have defended the law in court, declined to do so. So the proponents of Proposition 8 stepped in to defend the law, and the California Supreme Court (in response to a request by the lower court) ruled that they could do so under state law. But today the Supreme Court held that the proponents do not have the legal right to defend the law in court. As a result, it held, the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the intermediate appellate court, has no legal force, and it sent the case back to that court with instructions for it to dismiss the case.